How the Use of the Best Social Listening Tools Can Help You Build a Solid Business in 2023

Do you want to learn how the use of the best social listening tools can help you build a solid business? Have you heard about social media listening before? By the way, it’s the same thing as social listening. How are businesses like yours using these media tools? 

With the advent of social media and of course technology, marketing has advanced. Organizations now leverage the ever-evolving social media landscape to better position their businesses. 

You must know what your customers and potential customers think about your brand. Understanding their perception of your products and services will greatly improve your relationship with them and by extension, your financials. This is called social media sentiment. 

So how do you achieve this without burning out trying to be on every social media available? 

What is the difference between social listening and monitoring platforms?

Social Media Listening Versus Social Media Monitoring

Before we delve deeper in, let’s get this out of the way first. Social listening and social monitoring may seem synonymous but they are not. They actually differ in several ways.

Data Gathering

While with social monitoring, you are actively collating data, social listening takes it a step higher by engaging with the faces behind the data. This data collected can be from mentions of your brand or competition, industry trends as well as hashtags relevant to your industry.

Real-time Conversations

Social media monitoring gives you the data but it amounts to nothing if that data is not translated to serve a purpose. That is where social listening comes in. It gives you the opportunity to engage with customers in real-time. This can be as simple as responding to their feedback on complaints on the social media platform your brand was mentioned at.

Insight Vs Data

You can say that social monitoring is the foundation for social listening. Social monitoring returns information about who said what, when, where, why and with what mood or sentiment. As such, it is mainly data-driven.

ALSO READ:

• 8 Tips for an Effective Social Media Audit
• How To Make Money Using Social Media Today
• Unique Ways Professionals Handle Social Media Bashers

How the Best Social Listening Tools Work

For you to have an effective social listening strategy, your PR must know how the best social listening tools work. Fundamentally, you should know how to do the basics:

• Select a tool or software that works with your marketing strategy and objectives
• Sign up by creating an account and choosing the right plan
• Select the social media platforms available for you depending on your plan
• Set up metrics for collecting data where necessary 
• Schedule posts in advance
• Find insights from data
• Implement for the growth of the business
• Manage team access, roles and permission 

Examples of the Best Social Media Listening and Monitoring Tools in 2023

There are several social listening and monitoring software and tools, let’s take a look at a few and some of their features.

Hootsuite 

Hootsuite is very popular. It offers freemium, social media monitoring software that tracks interactions and engagements across diverse platforms. Those networks and platforms include Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, WordPress and so much more. 

On Hootsuite, you can also manage social media accounts by scheduling posts across multiple platforms as well as enjoy analytics features. It’s cool to mention that the platform integrates with more than a hundred apps that can help you do a lot more from your dashboard such as Hootsuite insights.

Hootsuite Insight 

Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch goes even further and gives you data from 16 billion new social posts every month, added in real-time. Save keywords or Boolean strings to find meaningful trends and patterns you might miss with social monitoring. Filter your searches for key metrics like dates, demographics, and geographies. 

Hootsuite Insights also makes it easy to track brand sentiment with intuitive word clouds and meters that gauge your sentiment and brand awareness against others in your industry.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence and acceleration platform. Analyze customer data, quickly uncover critical customer themes and capture unseen business opportunities.

With Talkwalker, you get Customer Intelligence, Market Intelligence and Social Intelligence all in one place. Accelerate your brand management, campaign strategy, competitive intelligence, content marketing, consumer experience, market research, and trend analysis.

Talkwalker is one of the most powerful media monitoring tools. Besides being able to monitor social media platforms and websites, it can also monitor print and TV and radio broadcasts.

Its image recognition technology helps you pick up social media posts with your brand or product image even when your brand isn’t mentioned in the caption.

Agorapulse

This all-in-one social media management software gives you a unified social inbox. It has a feature for collecting all your social media messages, comments and reviews in one place. 

Agorapulse inbox collects all your social media mentions while its listening feature allows you to search for keywords, URL, and handle on Twitter. Some other great features of Agorapulse are: 

• Intuitive publishing – strategically plan, collaborate with team members and schedule content for all your social media pages
• Social listening – uncover trends and insights about your brand and competition alike
• Insightful analytics – extract actionable reports that reveal what’s working and of course, what isn’t.

MediaToolKit

Whether a PR or marketer, MediaToolKit alerts your business of every mention in articles, hashtags or comments. You can also use the media reports features to build your strategies on valuable data. Explore tools that help you predict what will happen in the future. 

MediaToolKit is an award winner. Its media monitoring and social listening tools help businesses stay up to date with happenings in their industry. It would interest you to note that you get notified for mentions in any language across web articles, blogs, media posts, comments, etc.

Also, it has an advanced data analytics feature for measuring reach, sentiment and engagement.

Brand24

A powerful yet affordable tool for managing your online reputation. Brand24 does not just monitor social media platforms, it also monitors forums, blogs and even other websites for any mention of your brand. Asides from collating mentions and allowing you to reply, Brand24 analyzes your social media reach and interactions.

With Brand24, you can make use of advanced sentiment detection to segment positive, negative and neutral mentions. And what’s more? Follow up on comments from your brand ambassadors & respond to a dissatisfied customer before the story gets ahead of you.

Keyhole

With Keyhole, you get to monitor what people say about you in real-time. Its monitoring features also generate for you, brand and competitor reports easily. With Keyhole, you don’t need to be a professional when it comes to analytics, it simplifies the entire date for your understanding. 

With the momentum influencer marketing is gaining, Keyhole gives you tools to analyze influencers and ensure you are working with the right ones for your audience. Keyhole takes the pain out of your influencer campaigns, helps you find and engage influencers and also track the traffic they bring to you. 

Hubspot

This Platform is both powerful and easy to use. Hubspot has all the tools and integrations you need for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. 

All products on the platform are powerful by themselves, but the real magic happens when you use them together. They are:

• Marketing hub
• Sales hub
• Service hub 
• CMS hub
• Operations hub

Audiense

If consumer segmentation is top on your strategy, then, Audiense got you covered. Identify key audiences, discover fantastic actionable insights and use these to carry out informed strategic moves to grow your business. 

Digimind

Digimind is AI powered. Its intelligence software helps you understand consumer insights, competitive environment and market trends. Use Digimind to measure your audience’s sentiment thereby being in tune with their perception of keywords from your brand.

With Digimind, you can easily know how the public sees your brand versus that of your competition. It analyzes mentions to monitor trends and sentiment, presenting them very strategically as data visualizations.

ALSO READ:

• The Small Business Social Media Skills Gap
• Step-by-Step Guide for Selling Any Product on Social Media
• 5 Simple Ways Experts Survive Social Media Trolls and Bashers

Components of a Real-time Social Media Monitoring Platform for Small Businesses

The best social listening tools are built to help save you some time while focusing on some other aspects of your business. Considering the importance of data collecting and gaining insights, your PR department must understand what makes for the best social listening tools. 

So what makes for the best social listening tools? 

• It should help you set up social media streams that monitor conversations, keywords, mentions, and hashtags
• You should easily be able to monitor the competition. 
• The best social listening tools give you a platform to nurture relationships with influencers
• Real-time insights of happenings across various social media platforms to aid you in creating content and products based on the needs of your ideal consumers
• Track “brand mood” also known as brand sentiment. Beyond the data identify emerging trends and patterns

5 Ways to Use the Best Social Media Listening Tools to Build a Successful Brand in 2023

1. Boost customer support 

Brands use social listening tools to pick up possible complaints about their products and services. You should do the same. Customer support would be able to swing into faster action to address things with the use of these tools. This is why social media marketing is important to your business’s success.

2. Integrate it into sales

Train your sales team to use social media listening tools. As they listen in on the conversations, it helps them further understand your customers and can push findings to the production team. This will definitely impact sales in a good way.

3. Insights for product development and R&D

Before, during and after launches are strategic moments to engage the social media listening tools. It will further give the production team a feel on what customers look forward to and how the organization can serve them. 

It also helps with the research and development process during pre-launches. Enabling your team to understand what is working and what needs to be fixed.

4. Monitor brand online perception 

Yes, your products or brand has been mentioned online, but for what reasons? You can use the tool of preference to gauge customer sentiment. This is the overall health or perception your brand has outside. If the feedback is positive or negative, the monitoring tool would let your PR be in the know. This can help you write an effective press release to address certain issues in your organization.

5. Build your team

With the rise in portfolio building in the online space, you are likely to find brilliant minds who can work with your business. Some potential clients or existing customers may be just that perfect extra team member your brand needs.

ALSO READ:

• How to Increase Your Email Marketing Conversion Rates
• 10 Unbreakable Laws of Social Media Marketing 2022
• How to Start Your Own Digital Marketing Agency in Auckland

How to Conduct Social Listening Sentiment Analysis and Its Importance

Every business owner wants to know that the products and services they roll out are truly serving their purpose. But how do you get this data if not through social listening? Meaning, if analyzed wrongly, it is as good as not analyzing at all.

Conducting social listening sentiment analysis obviously differs from platform to platform. However, there are basics:

• Add your social streams. Import data from all platforms you need insight and information from into your tool
• Monitor mentions and even segment the audience to stream down to the most relevant ones
• Then find out the mood of the reactions you receive. Are they positive or negative? Scan through and implement the insights you gather

Conclusion

It is not debatable that every business that wants to thrive must have its ears on the ground. Utilizing both free and paid avenues to get into the minds and thoughts of your customers and potential clients is a worthy investment. 

So, which tool(s) have you used or which do you plan to invest in for your business? In all, do not sleep on this goldmine.